Abstract
It is possible to assimilate the writing of Gabriel García Márquez to a system in which spatial, temporal, and narrative configurations are fractals, a concept defined by mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot in the late 1970s. In fact, fractals, and most notably their self-similar property between the whole and its parts, seem to capture the indefinable topographies of fictional time and space presented by the Colombian. This article shows that the work of García Márquez resembles an open system in which condensations and transpositions of places, moments, and characters appear and reappear in different texts, so that fragments and contingent totalities preserve a self-similar relationship. With a close reading of some chapters from novels and several short stories and opinion columns written by García Márquez, this article contends that besides magic realism, magic fractalism provides another fruitful point of entry into García Márquez's work.
